Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Jim
Peters began the 1954 British Empire and Common Wealth Games marathon at a blistering
pace.He ran the first 25 miles faster
than any person ever documented at that point in history.Then, with less than 400 meters left, he
collapsed.Over the next 15 minutes, in
a confused and almost semi-conscious state, he staggered, fell, stood, and
staggered for about 200 yards before collapsing and being pulled by the
officials.(Video of his collapse can be
seen here [7:30-8:10]).

Stories
such as this often reminds us of Hebrews 12:1b-2: “…let us also lay aside every
weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race
that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the found and perfecter of our
faith….”

And…

Philippians
3:14: “I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in
Christ Jesus.”

The
reality is that our end matters a lot more than our beginning.The goal line means a lot more than the start
line.

So, are
we running to win?Are we running to
finish well?Are we running in
anticipation of hearing “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matt 25:21b)?

What
about our marriages?So much focus is
given on one day at the beginning, but what of the decades to follow?Let us live in our marriages with the long
term in view.

What
about our leadership?So much pomp and
circumstance, ceremonies and praise, surrounds new CEOs and managers, but what
of the days to follow?Let us lead to
make something that lasts.

What of
parenthood?So much patience and love
surrounds the first few weeks, but then life hits full force.Weeks, months, maybe years later, we have
fallen into poor routines where children become a distraction to our latest
sitcom addiction, requiring attention, and wanting to play.Let us model Christ in our parenting keeping their
spiritual future in mind.

What of
our spiritual life?So much passion was
shown in our lives as new believers and so much disdain for sin, but what of
future holiness?Do we let that fire
build in our lives so that the flame of God’s Spirit within us continues to
grow greater and hotter, or are we like gas thrown on a fire that has lots of
flash and heat initially but quickly vanishes?Let us live with an increasing awareness of the impending return of our
reigning King.

Let us
finish well.Let us together commit our
lives anew every day in anticipation of Christ’s return so that we might be
found pure and blameless in the day of Christ Jesus (Titus 2:11-14).

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

We are conditioned for disappointment
from a very young age.Life just doesn’t
always work out the way we want it.Sometimes it’s because we have a skewed perception of reality, which is
particularly true when we are younger, and other times it’s because reasonable
expectations are genuinely left unmet.Add to this general feeling of disappointment the reality of broken
dreams and broken promises, and we often, subtly, and slowly develop a
calloused undercurrent of mistrust.

Let’s be real.We have grown up in a culture of mistrust
where promises are made with crossed fingers and contracts have an infinitival
number of exception clauses.The
marriage vow is now a lawyer away from ending, handshakes have been replaced
with documents and signatures, promised inheritances and wills are changed,
promotions are given to the “other guy,” and the price quoted is rarely the final
price charged.Politicians certainly
haven’t helped: “No new taxes,” “I did not have sexual relations with that
woman,” “You can keep your health insurance.”

All this mistrust can easily slip into
our spiritual lives and Christmas is a great time to reassess and re-establish
our trust: not of man, but of God.We
are in a real danger of allowing the disappointments of life to discolor our
understanding of God, versus allowing who God is to rightly enlighten our
disappointments.We must not transfer
the emotions based on our circumstances to God; rather, we must allow a right
perception of God to shape how we respond to our circumstances.

The baby in the manger helps with
this.

Jesus’ birth is the fulfillment of a
promise given in Isaiah 7:14: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign:
The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him
Immanuel.”

This sign the Lord gave was to be a sign
that God would be faithful to his promise to deliver his people from their
enemy.He would deliver them through
Immanuel, which means “God with us.”Jesus is the reality that God came to mankind and dwelt among us in
order to defeat our ultimate enemies: sin and death.

So, every time we see a nativity scene
and we see that little baby in a manger, every time we see and sing the name
“Immanuel,” we are reminded that while we live in a world of disappointment and
broken promises, we have a God who is faithful.He will fulfill his Word.He will
do what is right, even at great personal cost.

Let us together renew our hope this
holiday season.For, we can trust him.

Friday, December 20, 2013

I'm sick of hearing about Duck Dynasty
situation.Phil's comments were crass
and poorly chosen, by the way, why in the world is he doing an interview with
GQ and a writer who curses throughout the article he writes?A&E overreacted as does everyone in
secular-politically-correct society whenever a comment is made in opposition to
homosexuality.There are "thousands"
of better opportunities for Christians to cry out concerning the intolerance of
our culture.Duck Dynasty isn't a battle
I'm fighting for.

First, it's a secular tv show on a
secular station, not a church.

Second, Duck Dynasty stars make millions
of dollars as public figures and should have the common sense to know better
than to speak so crassly in an interview with a paper that regularly crosses
the lines of decency to sell magazines!

Thirdly, I personally do not want to be aligned
with how Phil argued his point.It wasn’t
well done.

Fourthly, “professing” Christians
consistently inappropriately attack people who believe differently than them
and are often at times hypocritical in this area.

Fifthly, I don't know all of the
Robertson's Biblical views, but would venture that I would take issue with a
few important ones.

Anyway, go ahead facebook, twitter, and
blogging world, continue to cry out and mark the demise of A&E.They will just find another debase show to
air in Duck's place.Society will keep
on.Christian boycotts of Disney, Levis,
and other major entities rarely work, because at the end of the day, we have
short memories and don't take permanent stands as a whole.

If you want to fight the culture
concerning the homosexual issue and intolerance, there are thousands of better
examples than this one!

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Arrrgggghhhh.Ever have one of those weeks where everything
feels heavy, where your moods are as unpredictable as a cheap yo-yo, and you feel
like a shaken bottle of champagne ready to be uncorked?

We’ve
all been there, and lately, it seems that I’ve lived there.

How do
we deal with it?How do we “fix” this
problem and get back on track?After
all, Jesus said that his yoke was easy and his burden was light (Matt 11:30).

Well,
the answer is much more complicated as a whole than can be addressed here, but
some reminders can help steady the boat.A complication in this process often occurs when we spend so much energy
trying to figure out whether these spiritual attacks or tests are coming from
God or from the enemy.The reality is
that regardless of the source of the emotional upheaval in our lives, our
responses are to be the same.Here is a
recommended approach.

First,
we need to examine our lives for any habitual or blatant sins and repent if any
are found.Let’s be clear here.Living in violation of our conscience results
in emotional instability.We cannot
quench the Spirit and ignore our conscience and be left unaffected.Intentional rebellion eats at our hearts like
an aggressive cancer, robs us of joy, and produces incredible emotional
volatility.

Second,
we need to be faithful in the spiritual disciplines of Bible intake, prayer,
and corporate worship.Often, we don’t
spend time in the word, prayer, or go to church, because we do not “feel” like
it; however, in these times, that is the very place we regularly need to
be.We need to let God’s word settle in
our hearts (Ps 119:11), we need to cry out to God more faithfully in prayer
knowing that he is ultimately the object of our affections and the one we need
(Heb 4:14-15), and we need faithfully to encourage others in the church and be
encouraged by them (Heb 10:24-25).

Third,
seek forgiveness and accountability.Let’s
be honest, when we feel this way, we can be obnoxious, inconsiderate, and
mean.We need to confess our sin and ask
for forgiveness from our spouses, children, co-workers, or anyone else that we
have hurt in this process.We also need
to seek a couple of people to hold us accountable to the fact that our feelings
cannot be used as an excuse for outbursts.We should also seek wisdom from them on better coping methods.

Fourth,
we need to keep the “big 3” in check: exercise, diet, and sleep.Our spiritual and physical lives are
inevitably connected.When we neglect or
abuse our bodies, our spiritual life suffers right along with the physical
neglect.Exercise, diet, and sleep all
impact our emotional states as well.Be
sure to exercise reasonably (2 or 3 times per week for between 30min and 1hr
each), eat reasonably (be sure to eat enough, but not too much and reasonably
healthy food), and sleep reasonably (too much sleep will add to depression and
frustration, but too little will add to irritability).

Finally,
stay the course.Hey, the reality is
that it takes time to cross the desert.Sometimes, we just find ourselves in a tough season and we just need to
set the sail and be faithful through the storm.The season will pass.We just
need to be faithful and not allow our emotions or circumstances to serve as an
excuse for wrecking our lives with sin and our relationships with anger.

Sure,
there are a lot more factors involved and a lot of nuanced circumstances that
might dictate additional courses of action, but as a whole, if we will keep
these 5 things in view, we will find that the dawn will come more quickly than
it would have otherwise.

Blessings
to you as you seek to steady the boat and sail into the dawn.

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;his love [mercy]
endures forever (Psalm 118:1)

Do
you know that if you and I are here today, it is because of God’s mercy alone?
It is not because of who you are. It is not because of your education, or because
of the fact that you are a good person. No! Remember the words of Lamentations
3: 22 & 23: “It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed because
His compassions fail not. They are new every morning. Great is Thy
faithfulness.”

Oh,
let’s praise the Lord for His mercies. When you wake up in the morning, you
wake up to welcome these mercies that are always new every morning. When you go
to work, you go with God’s mercy. In your work place you work with God’s mercy.
You come home with God’s mercy. You raise your children with God’s mercy. You
go to work with God’s mercy. You sing with God’s mercy. It is all about God’s
mercy! And, take note, according to our text Psalm 118:1, this mercy endures
forever. Once it has been bestowed on you, it will remain in you.

There
is a well known hymn based on Lamentations 3:23 (quoted above) that says, “Great
Is Thy Faithfulness.” This hymn is by Thomas Obadiah Chisholm (1866-1960):

Great
is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father!

There
is no shadow of turning with Thee;

Thou
changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not

As
Thou has been Thou forever wilt be.

Great
is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!

Morning
by morning new mercies I see

All
I have needed Thy hand hath provided—

Great
is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!

My
fellow believers, we see this mercy displayed at Calvary when God sent His
precious Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to be our mediator, to die for our sin, to
redeem us from the curse of the law. That’s the mercy of God. And, the psalmist
says in our text, give thanks to the Lord, not only because He is good, but because
His mercy abides forever and ever. So, here we have the ground for our
gratitude. Let’s remember the goodness of God and His mercy. And, let’s learn
to trace all our blessings back to God, back to the cross, and to give Him
thanks. Amen!

I like
baseball.I played it when I was a boy,
and so did both of my sons.My sons even
got to play baseball for their high school.Nevertheless, there is one thing that is kind of silly about baseball
teams.It’s the fact that the managers
and coaches are made to wear the uniforms of the players.This is not the case in any other
professional sport.You would never see
Bill Belichick wearing shoulder pads and cleats.It just plain nonsense that baseball managers
have to wear uniforms.It’s not likely
that Don Mattingly is likely to pick up a glove play 1st base, or
pick up a bat in pinch hit for the pitcher.Don Mattingly manages the players, he doesn’t play the game, so why make
him wear a player’s uniform?

Unfortunately,
the leadership of many churches function a lot like baseball managers, they
don’t “play in the game,” they just “manage” those who do.This is primarily the case because many elders
of churches use up all their energies managing the church’s staff, the church’s
grounds, the church’s facilities, the church’s finances, and the church’s
policies.Why is this?

I think it is
mainly due to a misinterpretation of 1 Timothy 3:4-5.In this passage Paul gave to his disciple
Timothy the qualifications of a church “overseer,” which most scholars and
Christians today understand as the qualifications of a pastor or elder.In these verses the pivotal verb in both the
NIV and NASB is translated as “to manage.” However, the Greek verb “pro-is-temi” has
other possible meanings, one of which is “to lead,” and it is most likely that
this interpretation is the better reading for this particular passage.The fact is that elders are primarily
supposed to lead the church’s ministries, not manage the church’s staff and
resources.

How do we
know this is the case? Because Paul tells us that the evidence that a man will
make a good elder is the fact that his children are obedient to his
leadership.A man who can parent his
children so that they are functional and obedient is evidence that they can
shepherd others as well.Paul also wrote
to Titus that elders must have “believing children” (Titus 1.6).In other words, the family environment of
elders must be of an atmosphere where they were able to lead their children to
faith in the Lord.Paul’s emphasis to
both Timothy and Titus was that elders should be ministers to their families
before they should be given the responsibility of leading the ministries of the
church.

Unfortunately,
too many churches select elders not because they are effective ministers and
teachers (1 Tim 3.2; Tit. 1.9), but because they are good businessman and are
well liked by most people—therefore, they must be good managers, right?Giving the leadership of the church over to
men simply because they are well liked and appear to be good managers is a
recipe for mediocrity, and possibly disaster.Managers tend to focus on the proper and effective use of resources
(i.e., policies concerning things).Minister’s focus on people and “caring” for their conversion and spiritual
vitality, which is what Paul stated was the ultimate purpose and concern for
those leading the church—caring for those in the church (1 Tim 3.5). And shouldn’t that always be the main function
of any shepherd, caring for the flock?

Should elders
understand the church’s budget, yes.Should they have influence on the church’s policies, of course.Should they take the leadership in the hiring
of church staff, absolutely.But far and
away the most important function of elders is that they are primarily ministers.In other words, they display the capacity to
effectively exhort, enable, and equip others to follow the Lord Jesus Christ.
That is the “stuff” of ministry, and that what the church should be all about.

You know
there is one sure fire way to tell who the manager of a baseball team is—he’s
always the one with the cleanest uniform.Baseball players are never clean because they are the ones playing the
game.Their uniforms show wear and tear of
effort, exertion, and teamwork, of striving for a common goal, and so it should
be with the lives of those who serve as elders of any church.